Mary Riddell is a columnist and a political interviewer for the Daily Telegraph. She writes on topics ranging from family to foreign policy and is particularly interested in criminal justice. Her focus is what is going on, for better or for worse, in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Ken Clarke and the art of making bad prisons worse

Ken Clarke lays the blame for the riots on our broken prison system. No arguing with that. We don't rehabilitate people properly in jail, and so the majority go on to reoffend. At the first whiff of a free-for-all at JD Sports, these offenders-in-waiting are primed to join in the scrum.

It should surprise no one, least of all Ken, that 75 per cent of adults charged over the riots are previous offenders. More startling is the 25 per cent who, having never previously been in trouble, discovered the lure of looting. Neither the madness of crowds nor the cult of materialism explains fully why this should be so, but the first research into the causes suggests that the mood underlying the riots was one of utter contempt and disregard for politicians and authorities.

Ken addresses that point too, saying correctly that our "social deficit" can only be plugged with better education, more jobs and so on. Again, this analysis is not surprising. What's astonishing is that it has taken a Conservative minister all this time to talk real sense. What a contrast to David Cameron's bluster about "criminality pure and simple" and Theresa May's efforts (fruitless, it seems from the Telegraph's conversation with the DPP, Keir Starmer) to have juveniles named and shamed.

What Ken can't say, for all his capacity for straight talking, is that every move so far undertaken in the wake of the riots is guaranteed to make our broken prisons worse. The heavy sentences praised by the PM and the huge numbers of remands in custody and jail terms have already pushed over-crowded prisons to break point.

These jails are, as Ken almost certainly thinks, but cannot say, now being reconfigured as finishing schools for the rioters of the future.